The Device Solutions (DS) institutional sector in charge of Samsung Electronics' semiconductor business will receive 43–48% of annual salary as a performance bonus this year. The improvement reflects better results centered on commodity DRAM and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).
According to the industry on the 30th, Samsung Electronics notified the company of the expected payout rates for the excess profit incentive (OPI) by business unit that day. The DS institutional sector's expected OPI payout rate is 43–48%.
OPI, paid once a year, is paid up to 50% of an individual's annual salary within a limit of 20% of excess profits if the affiliated business unit's performance exceeds the goal set at the start of the year. The final OPI payout rates by business unit will be announced at the time of payment in Jan. next year.
The DS institutional sector has taken home roughly 50% of annual salary as a performance bonus almost every early year, including 50% of annual salary as OPI for fiscal 2022. But as the semiconductor downturn began, the following year's OPI was 0%. That year, the DS institutional sector posted a loss of 1.488 trillion won.
In the first half of last year, the semiconductor business returned to profit, showing signs of recovery, and the OPI for most business units—including Memory, System LSI, and Foundry—for 2024 was set at 14%. This year, with rising commodity DRAM prices and the full-fledged supply of HBM3E (5th generation), the payout rate increased sharply.
The payout rates for the System LSI and Foundry business units also appear to have risen slightly. The Foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) business unit signed the largest-ever supply contract this year with Tesla worth 2.28 trillion won, and the System LSI business unit decided to supply image sensors for the next-generation iPhone to Apple.
Meanwhile, the securities industry expects the operating profit of Samsung Electronics' memory business unit to surge from about 6.35 trillion won in the first half of this year to more than 23 trillion won in the second half. On an annual basis, operating profit is expected to approach 30 trillion won.